Duncan Watts (author of Six Degrees) wrote an article in the New York Times about the rich get richer effect (via). He reports on a series of experiments on the web where they tracked the rise in popularity of music in different “parallel worlds” where participants could either see what others were doing (social influence condition) or not (individual conditon). Their main findings were that in the social influence condition (where participants could see what others were doing), the hits were much more popular (and unpopular songs more unpopular) than in the individual condition (where participants could not see what others were doing).
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I came across this article by Jeremy Liew about how game mechanics can be applied to social media. He was referring to how many of the principles of game design can apply to social sharing sites. For example, easy to learn, hard to master, collecting things, providing feedback etc. I have been talking about similar issues in my “Designing for Social Sharing” talk for a little while now. And like with him, I have been inspired by Amy Jo Kim’s work. Another inspiration has been Katrin Knorr’s Cetina’s work on object-centered sociality and its interpretation by Jyri Engeström.
After all, what are sites like YouTube or SlideShare, but places for massively-multiplayer sharing of digital objects like photos, slides or video, kind of like MMORPGS, but different. Now, if only we could come up with another equally awkward acronym for these sites? How about MMOS – Massively Multiplayer Online Sharing OR maybe MMOOS or Massively Multiplayer Online Object Sharing? Thats not nearly awakward enough! Anyone else want to have a go at an acronym? Share below.
I was asked to do the closing plenery at the IA Summit this year. This is a real honor and I thought for a long time about what I wanted to talk about. I ended up talking about designing SlideShare and why we did not use many of the typical UX methods and tools for that. Instead we opted for an agile design process that works well with fast-paced development of a social (ok, I will use the word – “Web2.0″) application.
Update: Alberto Mucignat has a point by point analysis of my talk – in Italian!. Go here for original Italian version and here for Google translation.
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